Needing a front fan to keep his hard drive cool, [CalcProgrammer1] found he was unhappy with a single LED color for the fan. He swapped them out for a set of four RGB LEDs and whipped up his own controller board for the unit. It is based around an ATmega168 and patches into the COM2 header on the motherboard, providing a serial interface. [CalcProgrammer1] wrote a GUI to control fan speed, and individual LED color settings. You can take a look at and enthralling, edge-of-your-seat demonstration of how slider controls work after the break. Wouldn’t it be great if the HDD LED clock could be adapted to use a fan so that the front panel had a colorful analog dial on it?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J4vlAMgQDQ]
Gotta say, that’s a pretty sweet fan mod. I’m personally not a fan of LED fans (apologies in advance) but I feel like I wouldn’t mind if they were all that nice.
LEDs are cool as long as you have a kill switch for them when you’re trying to go to bed (my unmodded laptop lights up the room a night when it’s plugged in)
Yeah, the laptop lights are annoying, especially the flashing standby light that lights up the ceiling if I leave the laptop open. With the fan control panel you can turn all the LED’s off while still running the fan, or you can dim them so that they aren’t too bright at night. Right now my PC is under my bed so it doesn’t bother me though.
Ha! I thought I was the only one that was annoyed by laptop lights. Electrical tape neatly trimmed with an exacto knife does a good job of covering them up.
that’s a really slick mod. well done.
re: laptop lights
if manufacturers catch on we’ll hopefully see software tools to disable or dim LEDs in the future. the amount of little tools developers like asus are including now is much better than before so maybe options of turning off lights through the bios aren’t too far away.
until then, electrician tape like Pete suggested is the best bet :(
very cool hack.
WARNING: the link takes you to instructables.com !
Very basic hack. I will say, having the controller directly wired into a serial COM header is a plus, but if you’re going that far might as well make it some sort of cool POV fan display.
“if manufacturers catch on we’ll hopefully see software tools to disable or dim LEDs in the future”
I have an ASUS G2S lappy, with a little OLED display above the keyboard. The computer came with a program to set it up with scrolling messages and smiley icons. There is also a forum out there which made a cool program, LCDStudio, which will connect to and control it however I like.
The lappy also features *really* bright LEDs on the sides of the display which blink when I get email.
Sounds like ‘the future’ is already here :P
It’d be cool if he wrote a plugin for some simple audio visualization…
Is anyone else bothered by the noise that fan is making?
Laptop leds should all be controllable just on and off option would be nice and the fan noise is ok not like mine which sounds like a dam helicopter.